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This is an article I wrote last month for the International New York Times on what attitudes to identity and free speech among Sri Lankan audiences can teach those in the West. (I cannot publish my INYT articles on Pandaemonium until a month after it is published in the newspaper.) The article was originally published under the headline ‘A Sri Lankan Lesson in Free Speech’. I gave a talk last month at the Galle Literary Festival in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. This […]

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times on what attitudes to identity and free speech among Sri Lankan audiences can teach those in the West. It was published under the headline ‘A Sri Lankan Lesson in Free Speech’. The festival provided a space for engagement with a wide variety of ideas in a way that does not often happen in a place like Jaffna. It opened with a discussion of Tamil literature, which has a […]

The Lahore Literary Festival opens on Friday. Or perhaps it doesn’t. There has been over the past twenty four hours considerable confusion as to whether the authorities will allow it to go ahead, or for how long. Local papers have been reporting that the Lahore District Coordination Officer had apparently revoked permission for the Festival to be staged. Other reports suggest that it will be a two-day not a three day event. The Festival organizers have tweeted that it may indeed […]

Today marks 50 years since the South African apartheid government declared District Six, in the heart of Cape Town, a ‘whites only’ area from which all non-whites would be forcibly removed. District Six was one of the most mixed areas in Cape Town, home to freed slaves and immigrants, labourers and artisans. It was a rundown area, overcrowded, many houses without running water or sewage. But District Six was also Cape Town’s cosmopolitan heart, an area in which blacks and […]

The Canadian journalist Duncan Pike interviewed me recently for an article he was writing for the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression on the question of free speech and double standards. It centred around the upcoming trial of Anjem Choudary for ‘inviting support’ for the Islamic State. The article is a very good exploration of the problems and dilemmas of free speech double standards. My thanks to Duncan Pike both for interviewing me and for allowing me to republish his article on Pandaemonium. […]

Last year I gave a talk at the Oslo Freedom Forum on free speech and self-censorship. I also gave an interview to Google Ideas. It has now been published as part of a series of Google Ideas interviews from the Oslo Freedom Forum called Censored. Here is the original speech I gave, followed by the Google Ideas interview. . .

This is the full version of my last column for the International New York Times on Maryam Namazie, Donald Trump and censorship, originally published on 21 December 2015. Donald J Trump and Maryam Namazie are divided by more than the width of the Atlantic. One is a reactionary, with bigoted ideas seemingly about everyone from Mexicans to Muslims. He is also currently a leading candidate to be the next president of the United States. The other is an Iranian feminist, […]

My latest column for Al Jazeera English is about the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ in Oxford. It began as a campaign at the University of Cape Town to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes that stood on the campus. For the protestors, the statue represented everything that Rhodes himself stood for: racism, colonialism, plunder, white supremacy, and the oppression of black people. Last April, a month after the protests began, the university authorities removed the statue. By then, the protests had moved […]

It is a year today since Islamist gunmen burst into the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people, including eight of the magazine’s staff. A few days after the attack I was interviewed by the BBC. ‘Don’t you think’, the interviewer asked, ‘ that the degree of solidarity expressed towards Charlie Hebdo represents a turning in attitudes to free speech?’ ‘I doubt it’, I replied. ‘There may be expressions of solidarity now. But fundamentally little will change. If anything, […]

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times, which looks at the controversies surrounding Donald Trump and Maryam Namazie and what they tell us about free speech, Islam and the left. For the full article see the INYT. In the strange world of contemporary radicalism, however, many look upon Ms Namazie almost as they regard Mr Trump: as an ‘Islamophobe’. Student groups at several universities, including the University of Warwick and Trinity College Dublin, have attempted […]

Back in 2008, I gave a talk at an Index on Censorship conference on ‘Extremism and the Law: Free Speech in an Age of Terror’ in which I suggested that: One of the most significant shifts in recent years has been the mutation of the notion of ‘extremism’ from being a description of a political claim to being a quasi legal term. From the BNP to Hizb ut-Tahrir to Buju Banton’s homophobic lyrics, to label speech as extremist is to label it […]

It is perhaps appropriate that a new Danish collection of Jesus and Mo cartoons should be published this week, the tenth anniversary of publication of the original Danish cartoons. This is the foreword that I have written for the new collection. Satire can be a deadly business these days. Especially for those satirists who see it as their business to mock religion. And most especially for those who dare to mock Islam. The murderous assault on the Paris office of […]

From my latest column for the International New York Times, which was entitled ‘What Happened to South African Democracy?’: As the failure to transform the lives of the poor has eroded support for the party, many ANC politicians have turned to the politics of ethnicity and identity to strengthen their base. It is a development that has long been evident, but that has really gathered strength under the leadership of South Africa’s current president, Jacob G Zuma. Mr Zuma has unashamedly […]

These are some initial thoughts on the current state of South Africa, and how it has arrived at this point, emerging from various discussions I had with activists and academics while I was out there. I write, of course, as an outsider. But sometimes an outsider’s perspective can be quite useful, especially as I’ve engaged with many of issues at the heart of South African politics – such as race, class, identity, social change – though in a different context. […]

District Six lies at the heart of Cape Town, along the flank of Table Mountain, and just south of the city centre. It was so-called because it was the sixth municipal district in Cape Town. In it lived freed slaves and immigrants, labourers and artisans. It was a rundown area, overcrowded, many houses without running water or sewage. But District Six was also Cape Town’s cosmopolitan heart. In a nation defined by ‘aparthood’ it was an area in which blacks […]